The Conference Call

I had an amusing conference call this morning. Yes, I’m being facetious. By their very definition, there is nothing amusing about a conference call. I loathe them actually. There’s always somebody that loves to talk to an audience of folks , just because he has an audience. Furthermore, they always drag on much longer than they should have because said blowhard just can’t wrap it up. If those conference services (we use Raindance) wanted to add a useful feature, they would add what I’ll coin as the Academy Award Feature. Chatterbox’s filibuster shows no signs of reaching its conclusion? Start the music…bring the MC out to make a joke about his diatribe.

My pre-occupation and fatigue got the better of me. Pre-occupation? Yeah, I’m bad enough in a meeting when we are all face to face. I have quite a “portfolio” of doodles, some worthy of tour to some of the world’s finest museums: The Van Gogh, The Prado, The Louvre…. Some of them are as random as the day is long, related not at all to whatever is being discussed in the meeting. Some even contain caricatures of the principals in the meeting. But, I digress. On a conference call, I might be surfing the web, instant messaging, writing a blog....

I totally wasn't paying attention and twice, it was my
turn to speak and there was a long silence before I
chimed in. Another time my boss said, "right, Destah?"
and I said "RIGHT!" without having heard what he said.
I made a quick save and gathered a couple action items
at the end of the call. I took the lead and did the
summation before we all got off the phone. I then made
a beeline for one of the RF engineers
(oh..sorry...that's radio frequency) and asked my
question. For one shining moment, I had an Electrical
Engineering flashback as we began to discuss bandpass
filters and propagation and ..oh..nevermind..i know
its not interesting. I then returned to my desk and
quickly called back this customer to report back about
my findings.